Travelmatch.co.uk has officially launched a new travel search engine, enabling people to search for holidays based on requirements rather than the usual criteria such as destination, date, cost and period of stay.
The site has been in development for a looooong time – since 2006 – and was funded in 2010 by Lastminute.com founder Brent Hoberman and other investors including David Scowsill, former CEO of Opodo, and John Moulton, founder of Better Capital.
Travelmatch tries to differentiate by letting visitors use temperature, food, drink, children’s facilities and other variables to find appropriate destinations.
According to the company’s founder and CEO, Alex Francis, research shows 70% of people decide what they want to do on their trips before they figure out where they want to go. That may well be true, but the elephant in the room is that it’s going to be a hell of a mountain to climb to establish a new travel search engine in a market that’s long been saturated.
Travelmatch includes videos, pictures, blogs, links to social networks and TripAdvisor reviews for completeness, but the million dollar question is if the site will be able to stand out in the crop of travel-related destination sites and search portals.
